People are increasingly asking AI, not Google, to help them discover products. A recent one shopping The report says that Americans, this holiday season, will likely turn to major language models to find gifts, deals and discounts instead of traditional search.
Retailers could see up to a 520% increase in traffic from chatbots and AI prompts in 2025 compared to 2024, according to the report. For brands, this means how to show up in AI-generated recommendations, and quickly.
This artificial intelligence driven traffic growth is the bet back The Prompt Companya YC-backed startup that helps products refer to AI applications through GEO (generative engine optimization), a strategy designed for a future where AI agents browse the web on behalf of users.
The barely four-month-old startup, founded by Kevin Chandra, Michel Marcelinand Albert Pournamahas raised $6.5 million in seed funding and already counts Rippling, Rho, Motion, Vapi, Fondo, Kernel and Traceloop as clients.
“Over the past year, most of the growth on websites has come from AI bots, not humans,” co-founder and CEO Chandra told TechCrunch. “We’re already seeing developers asking AI tools for product recommendations within their workflows, and we believe that over time, humans will become less involved in parts of the purchase funnel.”
As AI becomes the first point of contact for product discovery and agents ultimately transact on a user’s behalf, The Prompting Company believes brands need to learn how to market to agents as well as to people.
This means, according to Chandra, that brands will need an AI-powered website, a version of their website built for agents without navigation bars, pop-ups or marketing fluff. “Most businesses still design websites just for people,” Chandra told TechCrunch. “But the fastest growing segment of users online today are AI agents, and they need a completely different interface.”
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Here’s how the platform works: First, it identifies and analyzes the questions AI agents ask by exploring models to uncover specific queries with purchase intent. It then creates structured content that answers these questions and automatically routes AI agents to “AI-optimized pages.”
THE Y Startup with Combinator support helps companies publish thousands of AI-friendly pages so LLMs can report their answers even when they don’t rank in traditional SEO. (YC has backed similar startups, including Relixir, Writesonic, and Bear.)
While SEO still matters, Chandra argues that GEO is quickly becoming the priority for brands. On GEO, product results appear organically based on conversational relevance, not paid keywords or search rankings.
This change can also change the way people buy products. Emerging protocols, including Google’s Agent2Agent framework and OpenAI’s partnership with Stripe, could further accelerate adoption by allowing AI agents to navigate and complete purchases on behalf of users, moving them from discovery to transaction.
“Imagine you’re a large e-commerce store. Users can buy items, make returns, compare products, or search for deals. We help our customers expose these actions to AI agents. Right now, these agents don’t yet click on these options or directly access APIs, but we expect that to change in the coming months,” said Chandra. “Once this becomes widespread and performance improves, we see a path towards more ad-based or conversion-based models. For now, our focus is on helping companies get discovered and recommended by AI.”
So far, The Prompting Company mainly serves fintech, developer tools and enterprise SaaS customers. The team says a Fortune 10 company also uses its product, for which it currently hosts about half a million pages.
Overall, traffic driving to client sites is in the double digit millions per month. The Prompting Company uses a subscription model, charging customers based on the number of messages monitored and pages hosted.
The company’s founders, Indonesian immigrants who met as freshmen, previously built with the backing of YC Typedream (YC W20), a startup that allowed users to build and launch websites in minutes with AI, before Lovable and newer entrants (beehiiv acquired Typedream last June) took off. The founders also created Cotter, a passwordless authentication SDK acquired by Stytch.
With The Prompting Company, they are trying to change the way people discover and buy products in the age of artificial intelligence. The seed money, raised by Peak XV Partners, Base10, Y Combinator, Firedrop and angels including Logan Kilpatrick, will help the company scale its platform and partnerships as AI discovery becomes the new distribution channel. The startup is also working with Nvidia to pursue next-generation artificial intelligence.
“If your product is not discovered or listed on ChatGPT, you are ngmisaid Arnav Sahu, partner at Peak XV Partners. “We’re excited to support The Prompting Company as they build the foundational infrastructure for product discovery — already powering Fortune 10 companies and fast-growing startups. Kevin, Michelle and Albert are repeat founders of YC and they are awesome.”
